16 February 2011

Earlier this year the Home & Garden section of the New York Times ran a story on books as interior design elements. The piece spotlighted a creator of decorative “book solutions” who helps clients fill their shelves with that certain je ne sais livre. Need 2,000 cream-colored leatherbound books to fill your library? There are specialists to help. Not so picky? Books-by-the-foot apparently account for 5% of sales at the Strand in New York.

The rise of these purely aesthetic bespoke libraries is perhaps a slightly unsettling comment on the book’s continued utility, or maybe it’s just a tad silly. But, hey, books are beautiful. We know that. A book collection’s varying colors, shapes, and sizes never fail to amount to a visually stunning collage that can also serve as a three-dimensional map of the collector’s intellectual path. But, as with the collection of 2,000 cream-colored leatherbound books for an equity manager’s “gentleman’s library,” sometimes uniformity can make an even more arresting visual statement than variety. We know that, too, thanks to the Loeb Classical Library, the 100th anniversary of which we’re celebrating this year. These little volumes of facing page translations enrobe Ancient Greek in green and Latin in red, setting a now iconic color palette for the classics.

It’s long been lore here that Martha Stewart herself is fond of decorating with Loeb volumes, particularly the reds. A couple of years back we also spotted the stack of Loeb volumes in this Pottery Barn ad:

Beyond such decorative appointments, though, the Loebs also get pride of place in some beautiful libraries and bookstores the world over. They’re great and useful books, after all!

23 November 2010

There’s no two ways about it: gift book season is upon us. ‘Tis the time for lush stacks of beautifully illustrated almanacs, glossy art books, lush boxed sets, impenetrable cookbooks, and smart new editions of old favorites. Well, we’ve got one of those last, and if you’ve been paying attention it’s not news by now: we’re quite pleased with our annotated edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, edited by Patricia Meyer Spacks.

We think it’s a book well-worth gifting, so we’ve put together a little something to try to simulate that feeling of flipping through a beautiful book and realizing who it’d be perfect for. And we have the book’s designer and acquiring editor to talk us through it. For Graciela Galup, the designer, part of the challenge in working on the cover for this book was in figuring out how a Harvard University Press edition of Pride and Prejudice would be different from all of the other editions already out there. Our books manage to stand out, she says, without straying from a classic, subtle style. Which is why this image to the right may work fine for Android Karenina, but didn’t quite cut it for us (just a little too racy, even without the robotics).

So, take a look at the video for a peek inside our Pride and Prejudice. It may just be the perfect gift for your favorite romantic, history buff, Austenite, Victorianist, or plain old book-lover. Or maybe it’s a little something for yourself? You deserve it.

The book consists of short articles intended to convey the various ways in which we humans are as much the product of our evolutionary history as is any other species. New Scientist called it an "eclectic collection of essays on humanity and evolution with something for everyone."

And the slideshow has even more! There are bunnies, there are sheep, there's the world's loneliest cow, and there's a gang of roosters that we just couldn't quit. Take a look.

10 June 2010

This would seem to be an odd question, but take a look at the spine of your favorite book—hardcover or paperback. If it’s a hardcover, what do you see oozing out there from underneath the signatures? And if it’s a paperback, what’s that opaque stuff holding the pages to the cover? Glue, of course. And what is glue famously made of? …

We actually got this question the other day from a Harvard professor working on an article, and we did a little digging to find out whether animal glues are still commonly used in book production. For this, we turned to Paul Parisi, the president of Acme Bookbinding Co. in Charlestown, MA, one of the premier bookbinders in the world (no joke—we are lucky to be located so close to them).

The answer? We can say, it turns out, that virtually all HUP books are, in fact, vegan. Mr Parisi:

I think the only place you are likely to see animal glue (now called “protein glue” —less offensive to the lovers of Mr. Ed) would be in case-making glue and possibly in spine lining—where the headband is glued to the book. Most adhesive binding for perfect binding, notch-cased binding and sewn bindings would be EVA (hot-melt which is wax based—not protein), PUR (polyurethane) or PVA (polyvinyl acetate). These are all chemical formulations and I imagine have some petroleum basis rather than protein/animal.

In short, the glues used in bookbinding today are primarily chemical emulsions with no animal content. It’s possible, our production manager speculates, that older, animal-based adhesives are still used in lower-end binding, like that for catalogues, directories, and the like, but when it comes to books, binders have pretty much completely switched over to newer chemical formulas, save for a unique project here or there where a customer has requested, say, "calf-binding," which is just what it sounds like.

If you really want to get technical about it, however, remember that today’s inks are primarily petroleum-based, thus carbon-based, and thus composed in large part of the fossil remains of creatures that dwelt upon this earth however many millions of years ago ...

Image: An HUP title in hardcover with a traditional sewn binding—click the image to get a close-up.

17 December 2009

When the affordable-original-print site 20x200 featured a
piece based on The Work of Art in the Age
of Its Technological Reproducibility, we were both seduced and
intrigued. Who was this Stefanie Posavec, and how had she transformed Benjamin’s most famous
essay into an organic form (tree? anemone?) with spreading multi-colored
branches? Happily, Posavec, a
London-based book designer for Penguin UK, proved willing to answer our
questions via e-mail, and to share some images of the progression of the work, interspersed below.

The finished product

Q: Do you have an idea
of what a visualization will look like before you begin your work, or does it
evolve as your analysis progresses?A: I have an idea of what the visualisation will look like up to a point: I keep
experimenting with the data and try to see whether the shapes that I have in my
head are feasible using this data set. Sometimes I have an idea in my mind,
yet, when the data is actually gathered for this visual, I realise that the
graphic that I was so fixed upon actually is impossible to create with the
given data, which is part of the process, I suppose. Often I try to use forms
to visualise the text that not only represent the data but also become a visual
metaphor for some of the themes found within the text. For example, the
Literary Organism method of visualising text, while merely a simple tree
structure, was meant to look like a living and breathing organic being. I
wanted to communicate how literature that has a particular resonance with
someone has a vibrant, living quality. Also, comparing text and organisms works
neatly as both are cellular in that they are complex structures produced of
smaller and smaller components.

First image

Q: How did you choose "Work of Art" as a
subject?

A: I worked with 20x200 for the selection of this essay. It was the first time
that I ever read this essay, to be honest! Normally I either pick my favourite,
most influential books to analyse or work with text that influences and
inspires other people and use the project to understand their reasons for this
love of the text.

26 March 2009

Greil Marcus's seminal Lipstick Traces is getting a twentieth-anniversary edition later this year. Poster art legend Chuck Sperry has designed a new cover for this treasured tome; the poster version will debut at Book Expo in May, where you can get a silkscreened edition:

Meanwhile, the new edition of Lipstick Traces (link is to the current, "old" -- but still nice! -- edition) hits a shelf near you in November.

16 September 2008

Come on down ... you're the next contestant on ... just kidding, come on down to the Harvard Museum of Natural History this Thursday at 6pm to see Scott Edwards, Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and
Curator of Ornithology in Harvard’s MCZ, and Leslie Morris, Curator of
Modern Books and Manuscripts at Harvard’s Houghton Library, discuss the origin and scientific significance of John James Audubon’s
early drawings. Edwards and Morris are among the principal contributors (along with Audubon's biographer Richard Rhodes) to Audubon: Early Drawings, which collects the naturalist's crucial early work in a full-color, large-format (11"x14") volume. Extra bonus for those who choose to attend--the speakers have decided to bring some of the Audubon originals with them, which will be on public display during the lecture. Normally this stuff is locked away in the Houghton Library, so this is your chance people!

To get an idea of what's in the book, take a look at the slide show we've set up--just a few of the 116 portraits contained in the published volume.

07 February 2007

From today's New York Times, the remarkable story of Saad Eskander, the director of Iraq’s National Library and Archive in Baghdad, who has kept a diary (now hosted at the website of the British Museum) of his efforts to keep the library open amid the increasing sectarian violence that ravages the city. Imagine if your day-to-day work included not only the problems of how to restore the burned and looted library to its former glory, but also devising ways to keep yourself and your employees alive amid unimaginable carnage. Take a look at what Mr. Eskander returned to after attending a conference in Rome last November:

I received bad news, as soon as I arrived to my office. In my absent, INLA was bombed twice and snipers' bullets broke several windows. Fortunately, no body was hurt. My staff withheld these information from me, when I contacted them. They claimed that they did not want me to be worried and to spoil my visit.

I spent the rest of the week trying to advise a number of my employees what to do, as they got death threats. The Sunnis, who lived in Shi'i dominated districtwere given an ultimatum to abandon their homes and the Shi'is, who lived in a Sunni dominated district, had to leave their homes. So far, two of my employees were murdered, the first worked in the Computer Department, and the second was a guard. Three of our drivers, who worked with us by contract, were murdered and three others were injured.

Read the whole thing if you can--"sobering" does not begin to describe Mr. Eskander's account of what he and his staff have to endure every day. The word "hero" gets thrown around a lot these days; this is a situation where it actually applies.

Manga from the Floating World is the first full-length study in English of the kibyôshi, a genre of sophisticated pictorial fiction widely read in late-eighteenth-century Japan. By combining analysis of the socioeconomic and historical milieus in which the genre was produced and consumed with three annotated translations of works by major author-artist Santô Kyôden (1761–1816) that closely reproduce the experience of encountering the originals, Adam Kern offers a sustained close reading of the vibrant popular imagination of the mid-Edo period. The kibyôshi, Kern argues, became an influential form of political satire that seemed poised to transform the uniquely Edoesque brand of urban commoner culture into something more, perhaps even a national culture, until the shogunal government intervened.

Based on extensive research using primary sources in their original Edo editions, the volume is copiously illustrated with rare prints from Japanese archival collections. It serves as an introduction not only to the kibyôshi but also to the genre’s readers and critics, narratological conventions, modes of visuality, format, and relationship to the modern Japanese comicbook (manga) and to the popular literature and wit of Edo. Filled with graphic puns and caricatures, these entertaining works will appeal to the general reader as well as to the more experienced student of Japanese cultural history.

It's a beautiful, innovatively-designed volume that does justice to Kern's path-breaking research on this little-known predecessor to manga, which has experienced a steady growth in popularity even outside of Japan that shows no signs of abating.

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The Harvard University Press Blog brings you books, ideas, and news from Harvard University Press. Founded in 1913, Harvard University Press has published such iconic works as Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s The Woman That Never Evolved.